Geezeo is a site that is supposed to allow you to enter all of your credit card and/or banking data, securely, so it can assist you in setting goals, and take control of finances. All via a simple web interface or even your cell phone.

So what is the twist? Well the Framingham, MA company takes all of this ability and wraps it with social networking. From this screenshot you can see how they take the Web 2.0 icons and make it so your own grandmother could pull this one off. You can join groups with the same goals as you, start your own or even have them push you along in true collaboration support.

I can say I did not go further into the site past this point. As some article writers may say that this will become a future of financial planning, having some website (outside of my bank, credit card company or place where all bills or sent) store all my personal information, pin numbers and accounts, well scares the hell out of me. With the current trend of places "losing" huge numbers of personal information to hackers, lost backup tape or even a laptop left in an airport, there is no way you would want to centralize all of this outside your own home machine loaded with Quicken or Microsoft Money.

Zyb was much more than I thought when I first read the specs on it. A tool to store stuff from your phone onto the server. Interesting. Sounds like a plan to start texting your friends like Twitter after they grab your address book. Well wait a second. You can not only store them, but assign another of the 100+ types of phones to your account and then sync back down? Whoa! All of the basic features for free, for now it says. Not such how they plan on making money if they don't have some sort of paid service coming up. Note what thought I had at the end of this posting

I looked up Blackberry and sure enough, 2 models (Pearl and 8700) were supported for mail, contacts and calendar. Here is what the site says in the description:

What is Zyb?

Zyb is an easy way to store your phone's contacts, pictures, text messages and calendar events online. ZYB also lets you connect with people you know and makes sure you always have their updated contact details on your phone. As most of your real life friends are already on your phone, ZYB gives some additional social features like photo tagging and content sharing with the people you know.

How Does ZYB work? ZYB lets you sync your phone's contents, over-the-air, with our server and allows you to control it online. Each time you add or change data on your phone or on ZYB, and sync, your ZYB account is copied onto your phone and vice versa.

So let me give this a shot and try and out. This actually sounded like a new way to do moving data from one cell to another.

This article highlights how Friendster is taking a basic graphical approach into showing you friends cloud. I am seeing this in other social networks slowly, but not many quite this large a userbase yet.

This article outlines it, but this type of movement into Chinese Internet space only means Google has succumbed to some of the restrictions, filtering and editing necessary to reach into those markets.

I say go for it and beat everyone else into the market area. Sounds like some sound business moves with not much risk. Pulling out of the space is just as easy, heck it is all just Internet.

So I promised more about the site. First thing, I am not sure if this is a bug or something broke on my end, but whenever I enter one of their flash areas, like iYLocate I am about to talk about, I can never close it unless I change the URL at the top manually. Meaning their boxes that pop up confirming your close action never seem to work.

So you are able to enter a whole bunch of preferences including gender, location, interest and on to get this graphical display. Clicking on a user then brings up their profile on the right.

If you choose to enter iYCommunity, it brings up a MindMap of sorts showing what community you are searching or belong to and then what others in the group belong to and on. You can sort and find common interests and join other communities. Each community will show a list of members and then a separate forum where you can discuss the topic.

iYDNA is probably one of the more interesting parts of the site. You go in and fill out the sliders about 3 core areas of yourself. This helps build the iYLocate are when searching for each other. This whole thing reminds me of Fidgt and it's graphical finder I will cover soon. Basically instead of a list, you get a nice flash response that seems to make it easier on the eyes and more interactive. Which really they are just changing how you view the exact same data you would enter on other sites. After filling out your DNA you can choose to keep it private or public so others can search for you. Base don what I entered and the number of people in the site, I got this little clip...

Thank you for completing your iYDNA. Based on the inputs of your iYDNA, iYomu has located a total of 0 people who have a similar iYDNA to you.

Nice.

Real quick let's talk about The Vault. Sounds like a secure and scary place. Their quote actually says you can store limitless data. But a quick screen shot on the right shows the entire opposite. They really need to address that. Plus with all the storage and sharing sites, I am not sure what you gain here.

There are a couple other very minor area, like some goofy graphical mashup where you select from their template pieces to make your own dream workspace. 5 minutes of wasted time, well wasted.

Overall score: 7 out of 10 for the nice flash and DNA area. The other 2 points when they build the site more and the final when they clean up the functionality.

I took interest in this site before they went live. They had an approach I had seen before with Fidgt, but they built their own community. Based in Australia/New Zealand, they took on some graphical interaction. Instead of just typing about yourself, you fill out sliders.

Instead of the normal search result screens of lists upon lists, you get a graphical display with proximity to your search variables in their iYLocate. The Adobe Flash player drives most of the rendering of these parts and people are sorted by percentage they match. When you highlight a person it shows their name and country. Clicking them brings their advanced details up on the right.

I did find that very open searches (like just for all women with no other restrictions) caused the script to run slow and even generate errors on the page. Defining more variables made it run well.

iYCommunity lets you build or join an active community and then see via a diagram, where others have joined and belong. A bubble tree of sorts.

I will play around the site some more tonight since it is out of beta and give more feedback.

So I read a short article, that I am not linking to since this is more opinion, and come to the confusion, I mean conclusion.

The situation:Basically the school is preparing the yearbook and the staff mentor/director is not there. Certain students are missing the fun pictures. Not where you sit with the bad combed hair or the goofy smile. The truly fun ones at the school functions, events and in the halls. Well the school doesn't have those innocent pictures for these students. So the yearbook staff logs into Facebook and starts grabbing photos from their friends pages.

Now here is where it gets sticky. Yes the Internet is forever, and don't put up what you do not wish those to find. Saying that however, the pictures were marked (ok most of them) for friends only, meaning you had to not only log in but be a 'friend' to see these. Which meant some expectation of privacy on the student's part that posted it. It isn't like pictures taken of you at the mall or walking in a park. You cannot expect someone not to be able to take them at that point.

The opinion: Did that give the right for the yearbook staff to use them? I say no. Many say if the pictures are there, then they shall take. I know feel the students did not have a malicious intent. They simply needed more pictures, knew where to get them and didn't think long term of the consequences. Unfortunately the consequences were two sided. The ones placing the pictures in the yearbook get into trouble for choosing content unbecoming to a school. The students in the pictures get in trouble for some of the pictures themselves. This leads us into a new topic for later that is creeping up on the Internet. How and should you get into trouble for things not associated with a job/school that get posted.

While I did not even attempt to log in or join, it is good to know my grandfather has a social community that he apparently could not put together in the 90 plus years of his life so far. Getting him to even touch a keyboard is a miracle as he thinks the typewriter still does everything you need it to. Half the time he makes a darn good argument.

But if you have the urge to get yourself, parents, grandparents or boss off your back and glossy eyed living on the older MySpace, send them on over. So this one slips through the review process strictly because I couldn't bring myself to follow some of the information on medical needs and vacation spots.

However, I shall bookmark this for future if there is even Social Networks still around and we all aren't back to typewriters when the Internet goes down.

I ran across this article talking about that exact fact. The interesting part was the comment one of the investors in Facebook made:

Sounds like a big number, except that it might not be enough to buy it; Facebook investor and director Peter Thiel recently asserted that for $10 billion, they would consider selling

While this article revolved more around what Yahoo has to do to get into the Social Networking race (Yahoo 3600 really isn't that good), the believed value of any site like this astounds me. Where is this revenue? Are ads generating so much value? Do you really click on them? I know I pretty much ignore them, while others run ad blockers so they never see them. I would love to see some statistics from companies that utilize these sites and how much they make. Not click-through, but real dollars spent. or Euros, whatever.

Yes this is a blatant theft of the outline that Jess uses on her page, but I asked permission. Why?? Because I am a hardcore admin and can make ugly tables to make you developers frustrated, but this was too nice to pass up.

Also Known As: Chris Miller (when awake)

Boring Certifications: (only because someone asked twice)

Workplace Collaboration Services 2.5 - Team Collab and Messaging

Domino 7 Certified Security Administrator

PCLP ND7

PCLP ND6

PCLP R5

PCLP R4

CLP Collaboration (soon to be retired Aug 2006)

random former R4 exams

CLI for numerous admin areas including Domino, Sametime and Workplace

CLP Insane

Yes, I write some of those dreaded admin cert exams you take. I won't say which ones so you don't come looking for me, but I will
say they are the real good recent ones that have been coming out.

Weapons/Equipment:

At work an IBM 2 GHz

At home a plethera of 6 machines with various Windows versions and Red Hat on a wired/wireless LAN

A Toshiba E740 with 802.11b (yes geek toy)

An Apple 40GB iPod that is filled to the brim

Compaq RioPort MP3 player (now in storage)

An EBook (REB1100) also for travel (Love that darn thing)

Verizon and they always seem to know how to find me, damn cell

Animals:

One dog, a Pug. He has been on this world before and seems to understand slippers and a fine cigar. Mind you that is him in the chair and not me.

Let us now also add a deranged cat that is in the process of being toilet trained. Update: Toilet traning was very very close.

Music:

Non-stop. At my desk, in my car, walking to work and back to my car downtown. In the house there is a crazy zoned set-up for you home automation geeks.

I am a self-proclaimed MP3 fiend, to which I have tried rehab 4 billion times to no avail. Next is the MP3 hard-drive for the car that I found. Now what kind of music you ask? I will never tell.

Languages:

Incredibly fast English

Very slow Spanish

Emoticon-ese

Learning Korean

HTML

Advanced Sarcasm

Geek class special abilities:

Notes/Domino overdrive

Workplace

Sametime

Active Directory (huh? kidding)

Quickplace

LMS, LVC and the other L's of elearning

Windoze junk

MS Exchange versions

LAN

TCPIP

Server Iron

Yeah, yeah it goes on some

Skills:

Get back to you here

Spells:

Hershey’s Stomach of Holding: Jess and I are fighting over who eats more chocolate. TWDUFF can help me out and vouch for me.

Character Bio:

This will take far more time than I have today. I will start with I was born and still live in St. Louis, MO. Even though for a couple years I was never, ever here and always on the road, this is smack in the middle of the US. Everything is just a few hour flight. That part is nice. No beach/ocean/coast isn't the best. But with the travel I make up for it.